REBELLION IN TIBET
BY FRANCIS WATSON THAT the mere desire to be left alone can make news in any continent is a commentary upon our age. Communist China, avowedly learning from Russian mistakes as well as from Russian successes in the manipulation of centralised power, has as yet no satellite parties to strain at the leash. But it has its 'national minorities.' And the element of independence which still troubles Moscow in Central Asia and the Caucasus is something with which Peking also must constantly reckon in its relations with the `non-Han' peoples. The declension of Tibet from virtual independence to the status of an `Autonomous Region' of the Chinese People's Republic has been accompanied by all the theorising of Stalin's famous Marxism and the National Question (which is on the Peking list for translation into Tibetan this year). It has also been accompanied by rebellion.
Reports of trouble in Tibet began to reach the outside world in May of this year. Active resistance was said to have broken out in February, and there was a story of Chinese retaliatory bombing of the town of Litang. Attempts to follow up these reports found Nepalese contacts retiring into diplomatic reserve, and the news reaching India through the trade-routes began to trickle away into the sand under the heat (it was supposed) of restraining directives from Delhi. On August 6, in Peking, a statement was made by Liu Ke-ping, Chairman of the Committee of Nationalities Affairs of the Chinese National People's Congress, to the specially invited correspondent of the Italian paper Unita. The statement began : 'There is no rebellion in Tibet.'
To go farther with Liu Ke-ping requires some geographical and ethnographical background, for he went on to speak of 'a rebellion which began many months ago, not in Tibet but in Western Szechwan, and to be exact in the Kanze Autonomous District on the border of Tibet.' To be no less exact, this is a Tibetan rebellion, with its epicentre among the hardy Kham people, who have not wavered in their traditional loyalty to the Dalai Lama merely because the Chinese last year incorporated their undemarcated homeland—which we used to call Eastern Tibet—in the Chinese province of Szechwan. And whether Litang had been blitzed or not, it has been by Chinese admission a principal area of disturbance.
What sort of disturbance? 'Not the least national content,' announced Liu Ke-ping, before anybody asked him. But to attribute to 'a few feudal landlords' and 'remnant Kuomintang agents' a rising which has kept the Chinese Army occupied since February strains credulity. Even by August Peking could only claim that the trouble was 'mainly' settled. Those who come over the passes to Kalimpong and Katmandu are definite that resistance continues, that there is a Tibetan 'People's Party' with cells throughout that wild vastness and that straight- forward, classless dislike of the alien invader is all of their creed that anyone needs to understand.
If the Tibetan cause, as we may now call it, has something of the grandeur of the landscape in which it is set, it also has its loneliness. Isolated units of resistance must be isolated indeed, and there is no hope of outside assistance against an enemy with a hinterland for supplies and reinforcement. 'When we kill one Chinese, ten take his place' is a saying that has come down to the plains. Aircraft over the Potala, convoys of lorries, and other photogenic symbols of progress have had publicity overseas, but it is the comparative patience of the Chinese in Tibet that makes them formidable. The time-table of 'reform,' accelerated elsewhere, is here expediently extended. The plan to break down the Dalai Lama's authority by exploiting the Panchen Lama seems to have been abandoned as a failure. It will take time to tempt a sufficient number of Tibetans to Peking, to train them as Communist cadres and so build up an effective party on the soil, but it is apparently upon this process that the Chinese are now relying.
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